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Upgrading to Visual Studio 2017 Project file format

The new project file format drops the list of included files, as well as moving the nuget references into the csproj are the two biggest changes that you should be interested in.

These changes will greatly reduces your merge conflicts when you have a lot of developers working on a single project

There is a couple of pain points though, the first is that VS 2017 wont update your project files for you and there is no official tool for this. There is a community one available though you can download it here

This tool only does libraries though, if you do a web project you’ll need to edit the file and put in you settings manually as well as adding “.web” to the end of the project type

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web">

Running this on you project files will convert them, however we were unlucky enough to have some people that have been excluding files from projects and not deleting them. So when we converted a large number of old cs files came back into the solution and broken it, as the new format includes by default and you need to explicitly exclude, there reverse approach form the old format.

So we have some powershell we wrote to fix this, firstly a powershell function to run per project